| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,550,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,400,000、Indirect Cost: ¥150,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥650,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000、Indirect Cost: ¥150,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This research focuses on the 18th-century texts left by Native and African people, who lived in the United States and the English-speaking Caribbean, in order to consider the process of acculturation in the Americas after the encounter with the Western culture. The dominant culture of the society in which those people lived was Western, so they had more or less accepted Christianity and had some Western education. Such people were very few at that time. Also scarce is information of the background of those texts including even historical facts. Especially paying attention to their sense of identity as a Native or an African while accepting the Western culture, texts of these writers are considered : Phillis Wheatley, an African poet in the United States ; Samson Occom, a Native American preacher ; Francis Williams, an educated Jamaican. Also other Native, African American, and Afro-Caribbean writers' texts in later period were considered, in order to follow up the process of acculturation. They include the study of the 19th- and 2001 century texts written by Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Charles Eastman, Frederick Douglass, Tupac Shakur, and Earl Lovelace, focused on their relation to the mainstream Western culture. The 180,- century texts are Western in style, and it seems very difficult to consider them in the traditional Native or West African culture. However, as is also the case with writers in the later centuries, the more they penetrated into the mainstream society, the more they were confronted with racism and prejudice because of their non-Western ethnicity. As a result they seem to have become more conscious of themselves as a Native or an African, interested in and sharing the hardships of their people with some sense of responsibility in spite of their Western guise and apparent elitism.
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